From Prof. Kelsey's Lecture, The Price of Salvation," Yale Divinity School Forum in New Canaan, 1998:
(adapted from)
Yale theologian David Kelsey teaches that, if we aware ready to trust in God’s promise, if our lives are illuminated by the light of the resurrection, our paths will be distinct in three ways. First, our paths will be marked more by the quality of our relationships than by the quantity of our acquisitions, achievements, or acclaim. All our acquisitions will ultimately perish. All our achievements and acclaim will ultimately fade. But our love of our neighbors, our God and ourselves is an imperishable participation in the eternal love of God. Second, says Kelsey, our paths will be distinguished by a freedom to take risks – freedom to take risks in the business of loving God, neighbor and self. If our ultimate destiny is assured by God’s unconditional love, then we are free to risk error – free to act boldly to right a wrong, to comfort the rejected, to bring peace to those in conflict without waiting to be sure that our efforts cannot fail. Finally, our paths will be free from the prison of perfectionism. If our ultimate acceptance and love by God is assured, then we can act out of gratitude rather than anxiety. We are free to work at what we really love, raise our children, care for our parents, lead our communities, pursue our faith – not with anxious minds seeking God’s approval, but rather with hears grateful that God first loved us.
From Phillips Brooks, An Easter Carol:
The great Easter truth is not that we are to live newly after death – that is not the great thing – but that we are to be here and now by the power of the resurrection; not so much that we are to live forever as that we are to and may, live nobly now because we are to live forever.”
2001
From Harold Masback, Apocalypse Now?" (October 28, 2001) at pages 7-8:
To take you back to my first sermon in this series, there were nods of agreement when I preached we would “pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend [and] oppose any foe” [John F. Kenney, “Inaugural Address” January 20, 1961] to protect our grandchildren from being slaughtered at their desks. But ruthless realism requires an acknowledgment that we do not know what we are actually to do as a church. We have plenty ideas about how to help the victims of September 11, and we have generously acted on those ideas. But how can our church help make the world safer for our children? How can we act urgently to leave the world to the next generation safer than we found it? That hasn’t yet become clear. But incurable hope requires us to acknowledge that if we invoke our spiritual heritage, God will tell us what to do. As the author of Second Chronicles wrote, “O God, we do not know what to do, but our eyes are on you.” [2 Chronicles 20:12] The God that guided Israel in the wilderness; the Christ who met Paul on the road to Damascus; the Spirit that anointed Luther in the tower will guide our church as well. We share our own congregational way, our own centuries-old way of setting our eyes on God. As Congregationalists, we don’t call this room a sanctuary, we call it a meeting house. For 270 years we have gathered in the meeting house on this hill to pray together and listen for God’s guidance. For 270 years we have shared our inspiration with one another in sermon talk backs and congregational meetings.
From Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Strength to Love, How a Christian Should View Communism", at page 122:
To paraphrase Martin Luther King, Jr., the ultimate measure of a people is not where they stand in times of comfort and convenience, but where they stand in times of challenge and controversy. We need to rediscover the courage of the first Christians who acted on their faith so boldly that jailers dropped their keys and Emperors sat troubled on their thrones.
From Ellen Goldensohn, A Late Summer Day", Natural History at 6:
(quoting Neal de Grasse Tyson, Director of the Rose Planetarium)
A witness to the towers collapse e-mailed his family the next morning, “I will never be the same after yesterday… How naive I was to believe that the world is fundamentally different from that of our ancestors whose lives were changed by bearing witness to the 20th century’s vilest acts of war.”
From Anchor Bible Dictionary Apocalypses and Apocalypticism", v. 1 at 279
The word apocalyptic comes from the Greek for “unveiling” or “revealing.” RefMgr field[22]: 2″
From Walter Wink, Apocalypse Now?", The Christian Century, (October 17, 2001) at page 17:
Wink quotes philosopher Gunther Anders’ prescription during the Cold War, “Don’t fear fear. Have the courage to be frightened, and to frighten others too. ‘Frighten thy neighbor as thyself.’ This is no ordinary fear, however; it is a fearless fear, since it dares at last to face the real magnitude of the danger. And it is a loving fear, since it embraces fear in order to save the generations to come.”
From Margaret Mead, quoted in New Realities (June 1978):
Nobody has ever asked the nuclear family to live all by iself in a box the way we do. With no relatives, no support, we’ve put it in an impossible situation.” RefMgr field[22]: 1″